Why are Normal Distributions Normal?

By Aidan Lyon. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 2014

189 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

Zipf’s word frequency law in natural language: A critical review and future directions (2014, background): “Mandelbrot (1953) shows how the Zipfian distribution could arise from minimizing information-theoretic notions of cost (Mandelbrot (1962, 1966), ideas further developed by D. Manin (2009), Ferrer i Cancho and colleagues (Ferrer i Cancho, 2005a, 2005b; Ferrer i Cancho & Solé, 2003) and, more recently”
Comparing the Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients across distributions and sample sizes: A tutorial using simulations and empirical data. (2016, background): “Hence, the central limit theorem can explain why certain psychological variables are approximately normally distributed (see Lyon, 2014, for a discussion on the factors that contribute to normality).”